I’ve been wanting to get a website for quite some time now. On Friday I went into negotiations with my credit card and we decided a website was finally worth the time and money. Cliff from work suggested Dreamhost as he’s been with them for a while and hasn’t had any problems at all. I must say so far they are even better than I had hoped. It took a matter of hours to set up my site with ftp access and I was able to access the site here the next day. So far I only have a template design up and a simple forum (which installed with one click thanks to dreamhost’s “one click install” section). I’ll slowly add pics and videos of CIC and generally put any important information there.

In other news, I’ve updated CIC to use Visual Studio 2005 Express. It’s a cut down version of Microsoft’s new Visual Studio and is free for the first year of use. After that it’s Damian I’ve got a button which allows you to check out the current file. If you want to add the same button follow these simple steps:

!!!WARNING!!! Below is some nerd speak, if you’re not a coder, just move along 😀

1) Click tools -> external tools
2) Click add to add a new tool
3) Enter the ‘title’ as whatever you like (eg “CheckOut”)
4) In the ‘command’ field enter the command for your source control program. For perforce this is “C:\Program Files\Perforce\p4.exe” (or wherever perforce is installed)
5) In the ‘Arguments’ field add the command the edit/check out a file. For perforce this is ‘edit $(ItemPath)’
6) You can untick ‘Close on Exit’ for the first few times and it will leave the command window up so you can make sure files were successfully checked out. After you are comfortable untick this and it will automatically go away.

To add it to the top tool bar:
7) Right click on the tool bar and click customize
8) In ‘categories’ go down to tools
9) Select the ‘External Command x’ where x represents the position of the command you just added to external tools. For me this was ‘External Command 3’ as there were 2 other external commands in the list by default.

I’m just working through adding the defensive state to CIC and generally getting the website set up. If you have any comments or suggestions about the site please email me at my new address (alistair -at- doolwind -dot- com).